The Apparatus of Global Numeration

Chapter 4 , “The Apparatus of Global Numeration,” is dedicated to our main case-study in this book: the Johns Hopkins Dashboard. In formulating “what” users saw through its data visualizations, the Hopkins Dashboard also shaped “how” its users morphed into agents of that vision. The capitalized Dashboard thus emerges as a pandemic “way of seeing” as well as a pandemic “way of being.” This chapter traces the genealogy of the Dashboard worldview to the pivotal decision made by the Bush Administration after 9/11 to move geographical data under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security. The militarization of GIS shows how the Dashboard intensifies the blurring of the boundaries between public health, national defense, and the lives of ordinary citizens. Finally, in conversation with Esheng Dong, the creator of the Hopkins Dashboard, we consider the steep challenges faced by the Dashboard in its role as the computation control tower of pandemic Big Data. Especially the lack of international standardizations in the production, distribution, and formatting of such data speaks of the global unpreparedness to manage a pandemic through the means that the Dashboard had to offer. This somber consideration drives our conclusion that, in its function as the premiere pandemic mass medium, the Johns Hopkins Dashboard communicated a heavily constructed picture of the world: a picture that, rather than providing facts obtained through reliable data, depicted it as a battlefield, even though the enemy was viral and not human.